John Stack's 2009 novel, and first in his "Masters of the Sea" series is Ship of Rome, which takes place at the beginning of the First Punic War (Rome vs. Carthage) and follows two men, the captain of a pirate-hunting ship named Atticus and his friend Septimus (leader of the ship's marines). Much of the first book moves back and forth between the two men's world views (Atticus is of Greek descent and seen basically as a second class citizen throughout, while Septimus is a member of an old Roman family and resents his work on a ship rather than the work with the legions he began his career in).
The novel follows the two men through the initial outburst of the war and was pretty fun overall; there were romance subplots and a pair of senators who duel for control of the early republic, but the book really stands out in the depiction of naval war, yes there re some anachronisms (specifically the use of slave galley's for the era), but the scenes are pretty action packed and the tension gets quite high throughout.
Well worth the read and it definitely has me looking forward to the sequel.
One of four rereads for me on David MacClaine's list of 50 Historical Fiction novels set in Ancient Rome, I read Roma a few years back when I was reading Saylor's mystery fiction following his character Gordianus the Finder.
Roma takes place over more than 1000 years, from the earliest days of what would become Rome but was simply a good place to find salt, through its time as a trading post, a city, a kingdom, and eventually the Republic. The novel is basically eleven interconnected short stories following the ups and downs of a family line while also showing how Rome as a city grew over time.
As a follow up to Alfred Duggan's Founding Fathers, it gives a nice overview of where the first half of this fifty book list is going to cover, and also does a nice job of giving a flavour to the setting, but shying away from one simple character we get to follow priests, leaders, warriors, slaves, vestal virgins, and more, giving a much more complex picture that one protagonist could have given us.
A great way to introduce yourself to both the subject matter and Saylor's work (of which I'm a pretty big fan), Roma is an excellent read and well worth your time.
Like a lot of people, I took some time this weekend to check out Us, Jordan Peele's follow up to his 2017 film Get Out.
Us is the story of the Wilsons, Adelaide, Gabe, Zora, and Jason, and the family vacation they take that goes terribly, horribly wrong. If you've seen the trailer, you can see the basic concept - what if your home was invaded... by you? One of the creepiest (and most effective) aspects of the film is the fact that both the protagonists and the antagonists are played by the same actors, and leads Lupita Nyong'o and Winston Duke are both really great playing both regular folk and their own terrifying reflections.
Without going into spoilers, I'll say the film was a lot of fun, kept me on the edge of my seat, and is my current front-runner for favourite film of 2019 (although to be fair I love horror and it is only March).
Well worth seeing, but bring a friend, you wouldn't want just yourself for company, not for this film.
So I picked up Joyce Carol Oates Hazards of Time Travel simply because I liked the title and I'd enjoyed her 1995 novel Zombie. The book starts in a dystopian future and follows a young woman named Adriane Strohl through her last few days of high school and her subsequent imprisonment in a University in 1959 Wisconsin.
On the surface, the book felt a lot like 12 Monkeys to me, wherein our protagonist is punished by being sent somewhere that is arguably better than where they came from. Are there problems? Absolutely, Oates has found a great way to highlight the negatives of late '50s America by showing it as a University based on blandness, everyone working hard to be consistently forgettable. Renamed Mary Ellen, Adriane stumbles through her first year learning and relearning exactly how closed off America was during the period and for me, some of the greatest strengths of the book come from the character study of Mary Ellen/Adriane, rather than the dystopian future or the science of the time travel.
An interesting read that left me with more questions than answers, but honestly, isn't that what we want from speculative fiction?
